On Wednesday, US President Joe Biden responded to criticism that the hasty withdrawal of forces from Afghanistan was a “simple choice,” saying it was “a simple choice.” Biden also stated that the fallout in Afghanistan as a result of the withdrawal could not have been handled without “chaos.”
Biden was asked whether the situation over the last week was the result of intelligence, planning, execution, or judgement failure in an interview with American television network ABC. In response, Biden stated that he “doesn’t think it was a failure” and that it was a simple decision.
As he defended himself against the backlash, Biden also blamed the South Asian nation for the collapse of the Afghan government and the meltdown of Afghan forces. “When you had the Afghan government, the leader of that government, getting on a plane and flying to another country, when you saw the significant collapse of the Afghan troops we had trained, 300,000 of them, just leaving their equipment and flying away… that’s what happened,” he said during the interview.
“No, I don’t think it could have been handled in a way that, we’re going to go back in hindsight and look, but the idea that somehow, there’s a way to have gotten out without chaos ensuing, I don’t know how that happens,” Biden also said.
Afghanistan was thrown into chaos after the Taliban took control of the country by capturing cities one by one in just ten days. Thousands of people have attempted to flee Kabul since it fell over the weekend, fearing a return to the Taliban’s brutal regime that ended 20 years ago.
Following the military takeover, the group seized massive amounts of weaponry, equipment, and munitions from the Afghan armed forces, the majority of which was supplied by the US over the previous two decades.
Critics argue that the US could have avoided the country’s chaos by better managing the situation or delaying the troop withdrawal. The Biden administration had promised a “orderly drawdown” of America’s longest war for years, with the president claiming that US forces no longer have a national interest in fighting in a long war.
The mission in Afghanistan has also been completed, according to Secretary of State Antony Blinken. “We went to Afghanistan with one mission in mind 20 years ago, and that mission was to deal with the people who attacked us on 9/11, and that mission was successful,” Blinken said.
In 2001, the United States invaded Afghanistan and overthrew the Taliban government.
